Editorial: Weighing Virginia's votes

Be it flawed or fair, the Electoral College system is probably here to stay

January 29, 2013

The Electoral College is a confounding American political institution: Many claim they hate it, few really understand it and yet we can't seem to change it.

That doesn't stop people from trying, especially following a close presidential election. In the 200 years since its establishment, about 700 proposals have been introduced in Congress to alter or eliminate the Electoral College.

On Tuesday, a Senate panel considered and rejected a proposal by some Virginia Republicans to change the "winner takes all" method of casting electoral votes. Under current rules, the winner of the popular vote receives all 13 of the state's electoral votes. Only two states, Nebraska and Maine, do not follow this pattern. In those states, the winner of the popular vote gets two electoral votes and the remainder is awarded by congressional district.

Democrats pushed for a similar change in the system after the 2000 election, while Republicans want one now. No matter which party claims the Electoral College is flawed, trying to alter it right after an election looks a whole lot more like political sour grapes than wise governance.

The Founding Fathers set up the system as a compromise between three hotly debated methods of electing a president: selection by Congress, selection by state legislatures and selection by the general public. Vesting the power in Congress would have given the legislative branch too much authority over the executive branch. And despite all those underpinnings of democracy, the Framers thought allowing the people at large to select the president would vest too much power in an ignorant populace. Andrew Hamilton said it a little more tastefully in the Federalist Papers: "A small number of persons, selected by their fellow citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations."

So we ended up with a system whereby designated electors from each state cast their votes for president. Each state receives one elector for every senator and one for each representative, so the minimum number of electoral votes a state can have is three.

Small states tend to like it, while heavily populated states tend to prefer the popular vote. And inevitably, the battleground states get all the attention while predictable states feel left out of the process.

Yet truly replacing the Electoral College would be a major undertaking, requiring a constitutional amendment. Any new method would have to be approved by two-thirds of the House, two thirds of the Senate and three fourths of the states. It would only take 13 states to kill it, and as long as there are 13 smaller states wanting to hang onto the power of the Electoral College, it's probably not leaving us anytime soon.

Love it or hate it, here are 10 things you may not know about the Electoral College:

•The Electoral College members don't cast their votes until the first Monday following the second Wednesday in December — more than a month after the general population votes.

•Until 1800, the candidate who came in second was declared vice president.

•Eight states and the District of Columbia have adopted a campaign known as National Popular Vote, which awards electors to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of individual state results.

•If no candidate wins a majority of the electoral votes (270), then the House of Representatives chooses the president and the Senate chooses the vice president. The last time the House chose a president was 1824, when the House elected John Quincy Adams after Andrew Jackson had won a plurality of electoral votes.

•Because the apportionment of Electoral College voters is based indirectly on the U.S. Census, states may gain or lose votes from one 10-year cycle to another.

•Under the initial system, each elector had two votes.

•In 2000, one of the District of Columbia electoral voters turned in a blank ballot, as a gesture to acknowledge its lack of statehood.

•On a few occasions, electors have not voted for the candidate they were "supposed" to support; however, no one has ever been prosecuted for such disloyalty.

•In 1984, Ronald Reagan won the largest electoral vote total in America's history, with 525. However, the largest margin of victory was in 1936, when Franklin Roosevelt received 523 and Alfred Landon received 8. (Roosevelt carried every state but Maine and Vermont.)

•Before Bush-Gore in 2000, the last race where the winner of the popular vote lost the election was in 1888, when Benjamin Harrison beat Grover Cleveland in the Electoral College.